Track: Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Supply chain management involves adapting to changes in complex global network of organizations, and thus we will not examine it as a set of sequential, vertically organized transactions representing successive stages of value creation but as a whole system. Operational complexity and dispersion are making the supply chain more vulnerable to risks. In recent years, there have been a number of high-profile events and persistent problems that have severely disrupted the ability of firms to produce and distribute their products, including devastating earthquakes, political turmoil, fuel crises, diseases and terrorism. Evidence suggests that a firm that responds to a disruption better than its competitors could improve its market position. Our study focus on identifying critical success factors in supply chain resilience and understanding causal relationships between them. In This paper we consider the supply chain resilience as a complex system as we describes it with an application of a systems approach known as the current reality tree from the theory of constraints, the study was conducted in a group-based model-building environment with a group of students who specialized either in supply chain management or process engineering science. We developed our conceptual model including supply chain robustness, agility, flexibility and visibility to deal with resilience complexity and we suggest that understanding the dynamic nature of supply chain resilience through cause and effect relationships is critical to build future resilient strategies